INTEROP: Developing Community-based DRought Information Network Protocols and Tools for Multidisciplinary Regional Scale Applications (DRInet) Purdue Universtiy
Drought is a slow-acting natural hazard characterized by critical water shortages with far-reaching consequences. The National Drought Policy Act of 1998 and the follow-on National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) legislation of 2006 indicate the immense importance of good drought information. Evidence suggests that a drought has many impacts, which can be categorized as economic, environmental, or social: - Regional air quality (possibly increasing ozone levels, dust, and biogenic emissions), - Plant disease potential (by making plants more vulnerable to certain diseases and rusts), - Human health (both through substandard water and in some cases dust and other emissions), - Reduced crop, rangeland, and forest productivity, - Increased fire hazard and indirectly insurance rates, - Reduced water levels and access to recreation, - Increased livestock and wildlife mortality rates, - Direct and indirect impact on regional economy, - Higher cost of living due to increased prices for food and timber and unemployment, - Reduced regional tax revenues because of reduced expenditures, - Increased crime, and foreclosures on bank loans to farmers and businesses, and - Migration and reduced living worthiness of a region.
Drought maps and information on the intensity, geographic extent, and duration of meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological droughts draw users ranging from farmers to scientists. While drought mapping nationally has been standardized through the U.S. Drought Monitor, local and regional scale interpretation is still evolving. Relevant data are generated by different scientific domains and qualitative information from a number of sources on factors such as ground impacts, timing of a drought, and regional vulnerability or resilience also factors into analyses. However, all this data is not currently interoperable for sharing and comparison for different stakeholders, nor is it optimally integrated to characterize drought risks and user decisions in real time. It is not easy to access information for risk mitigation at the watershed, county, or farm levels.
Purdue University is developing a regional drought information web portal, DRInet, which will be a focal point for collecting, synthesizing and disseminating local- to regional-scale drought-related datasets and commentary in a systematic, retrievable way. DRInet will provide a basis for the community to better assess and accommodate droughts and drought impacts. By formalizing data and information exchange, DRInet puts drought data, drought forecasts, and the analysis of causal factors for droughts into an interoperable framework that allows new dialogues between different disciplines and so creates novel opportunities for research and economic well being. DRInet also provides a means for interfacing with the community for assessing drought triggers, evaluating possible causal factors for short-term and long-term drought evolution, delineating the impact on the drought monitor network, and developing novel linkages with stakeholders for applications related to drought impacts on air quality, water quality, economic forecasts, plant disease etc. DRInet will enable farmers to use the local drought data, soil condition and weather forecasts to decide when and how intensely to irrigate. Other constituencies interested in accurate drought data include climatologists, hydrologists, county extension educators and town managers, economists, agriculture experts, policy makers, media, and the commodity market, each wanting to use drought data for their particular purposes.
DRInet will benefit from community participation including those from National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska Lincoln; National Water and Climate Center, NRCS, Portland; NOAA Central Region Climate Focal Point; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India; International Center for Water Resources Management, Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio; Agriculture and Natural Resource (ANR) Program, Purdue University Cooperative Extension Services and Indiana State Climate Office; and the Midwest Regional Climate Partners ? University of Illinois, Western Kentucky University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin.
Droughts have deep societal and economic impacts, from merely inconvenient effects like brown lawns, to lower crop yields and incomes for farmers and higher grocery bills for consumers, to mass starvation in areas of the world where drought may severely curtail food supplies. Yet, droughts remain one of the more difficult natural disasters to characterize, model, predict and mitigate. The driNET project is helping to address this by developing a Web-based system for managing, accessing and analyzing data related to the onset of drought and its impacts along with Web-enabled tools to probe, integrate and visualize that data to create new knowledge and aid decision making. This prototype drought knowledge generator can be used by, among others, climatologists, hydrologists and other researchers alongside farmers, water system managers, businesses, economists, and local, state and national policy makers, as well as international users. The driNET Web site, located at drinet.hubzero.org, also incorporates features for making research results, presentations, training programs and other drought-related educational materials available and features to facilitate online collaboration among drought researchers and other people with an interest in understanding, predicting and mitigating droughts and drought effects. The driNET project has developed such useful tools as methods for identifying triggers of droughts, and for identifying the relationships between droughts and severe weather. A probabilistic classification tool for droughts, also developed by the driNET project, provides a way to assess whether a predicted drought is more or less likely and to what extent, while a decision support system is designed to help urban planners develop policies to help ensure water availability and quality. Another tool, called the Drought Impact Viewer, allows users to study the impact of drought on various types of crops by comparing current yearly crop data published by U.S. Department of Agriculture and the weekly drought map published by the U.S. Drought Monitor site. Using a Web-enabled Flash interface, almost anyone can access the information and also look at historical drought impacts. Already, in a pilot test of some of these tools, the driNET team has collaborated with the Indiana Water Shortage Task Force, which is developing a long-range strategic plan for the state of Indiana to address water resources and water shortage strategies. This is just one example of how the growing array of resources generated by the project and available through the driNET hub can help prepare for the possibility of droughts and head off their most severe impacts before they happen. The data management tool, iData, prototyped under this project, is now being used by other federally and non-profit funded projects to help cereal crop producers utilize climate variability information to improve resilience and profitability of U.S. farms, and to develop and publish consistent global spatial data sets on agriculture, land use and the environment for use by scientists, decision makers and development practitioners. Among its functions, iData supports data producers in associating standardized descriptive terms, otherwise known as metadata, with a data set. Assigning metadata to data sets enables the creation of catalog records for the data, which help people locate the data they need, similar to a library catalog. Metadata also helps people to see how one data set relates to other data sets within or outside of the driNET portal. Finally, metadata provides information about the source of the data and how it was developed, information needed to be able to understand the data fully. The driNET project not only benefits researchers in the disciplines represented by the investigators on the project, the tools and technologies developed also help make geospatial data analysis available online and accessible to the broader community. The driNET prototype website has had more than 1,200 unique users in the past 12 months, including people who use the Web-enabled tools, access data sets, download presentations, papers, and tutorials, and use the site for collaborations.
